(Things I found interesting recently.)
P.J. O’Rourke on corporate corruption:
However, if corporate corruption does exist, it has benefits as well as liabilities. Auditing scandals will no doubt improve the sex lives of accountants. Bean counters were previously thought to be drab and unattractive creatures. Now accountants are considered cute–by their fellow prison inmates.
Sunday Times: Tourists to invade Kabul on ‘axis of evil’ holidays:
“Seven weeks after the Royal Marines pulled out, the tourists are going in. Despite Foreign Office warnings and the threat of kidnap, landmines and US airstrikes, two British tour companies are offering holidays to Afghanistan. … The trips are the ultimate in a new trend dubbed hardship holidays. Booming numbers of western travellers are searching ever harder to find authentic off the beaten track experiences, and enterprising tour operators are answering the demand with trips to the slums of Rio, sweatshops in El Salvador and South African townships. ”
I doubt it’s the same. I’d love to visit Afghanistan, although I’m happy to wait a few years until everything’s settled down a little. Also, from the sounds of it, most of the visitors want to go for the same reasons, or because they visited in the 70s — like these folks did.
The city of Rome has admitted defeat in a long battle with a disabled man who is believed to make £100,000 a year collecting coins from the Trevi fountain.
“ Kangaroo scrotum pouches are unusual sentimental little gifts that last and remembered for a long time because of its uniqueness.” Well, I can’t argue with that… (fwd: Bob Rickard’s forteana post)
Irishman could face 10 years in jail for helping asylum-seekers to escape from Australian camp:
His solicitor told the court that he was pleading guilty to the offence. However she asked the court not to jail her client, who has no previous convictions, and who is due to leave Australia when his visa runs out in a few months time.
However the crown prosecutor said that the offence was such that it required a stiff penalty, both to punish the offender and as a deterrent to other would-be criminals considering similar action.
…
Insp Des Bray confirmed that Mr O’Shea had been arrested and charged at a campsite in Port Augusta on July 2nd. In a court appearance on July 3rd, Mr O’Shea was refused bail, and has been in jail since.
“Criminals”? In my opinion, Jonathan O’Shea’s a hero. Personally, I don’t miss the anti-refugee feeling in Australia.
A classic byline:
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (July 24, 2002 9:37 p.m. EDT) – Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.
It’s even tougher when you’re a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.
“An obsessive anti-abortionist who murdered a security guard has quoted Bible passages to a Supreme Court judge to try to prove he is not psychotic.” Fwded from forteana…
EBay comes in handy as a “source of evidentiary ephemera for asbestos litigators”:
After a heated bidding war on EBay, Mark Lanier recently paid $2,125 to win a 1941 naval machinery manual. It sounds like a peculiar collecting hobby, but to Lanier it was serious business. The Houston lawyer, who sues companies on behalf of asbestos exposure victims, was bidding against a defense lawyer to get his hands on an evidentiary trophy filled with details on where and how asbestos was used aboard ships.
LA Times, via Gary Stock on the Irregulars list…
Here we go again — the Dead Russian Composer Personality Test. My result:
If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Igor Stravinsky.
Known as a true son of the new 20th Century, my music started out melodic and folky but slowly got more dissonant and bizzare as I aged. I am a traveler and a neat freak, and very much hated those rotten eggs thrown at me after the premiere of The Rite of Spring.
Har har… a tale of two emails. Take one April 3 2000 post to ILUG:
The concept of revocable email addresses has been around for ages – once you’re set up to do subaddressing (such as user+foo@bar.com), it’s dead easy to do all by yourself, with the added bonus that you’re not dependant on some third party service provider.
Yep, sure I do it myself using virtusertable: jm-latestdodgydotcomstock@jmason.org gets deleted once it gets spammed.
Forget all about it for 2 years…
… and eventually follow up with a 20 July 2002 spam to me:
Long Beach Film Festival – Now Accepting Films & Screenplays
The Long Beach Film Festival is now accepting screenplays and films (short, documentary & feature) in all formats. The winners’ work will be reviewed by a committee of established production companies. This is a great way to get exposure and even discovered in Hollywood.
What address was it sent to? Yes, that’s right — jm-latestdodgydotcomstock at jmason.org. Oh the irony.
Good article explaining why the ‘distributing objects by class’ model doesn’t work – found at Morbus Iff’s blog.
Collatoral Spammage 2002, a “How much spam do you get?” survey, results here. (found via aaronsw’s blog).
Currently there’s a neat curve around 21-50 per week, and then a big jump at the 201-400 range, where I find myself (spamtraps not included — they get more like 30k spams a week ;)
I reckon this jump in the graph is a result of the poll URL being passed around people who are interested in the subject — who, if my experience is anything to go by, generally find themselves interested because they’re snowed under by the stuff.
Anyway, some further reading brings me to two TidBITS articles on the
subject: Content
Filtering Exposed and Email
Filtering: Killing the Killer App.
For what it’s worth, I agree to an extent with Adam and Geoff on the subject: the mail delivery infrastructure should not be clogged up with content filtering, with two caveats. (read on for more)
The Spam Has Got To Go — (link via HtP) —
“I used to think that spam was akin to junk mail that we all get in our physical mailboxes. I once even argued that I got more junk postal mail than junk email. Those days are long gone. It has now become a daily deluge. It is analogous to people driving by your house and stuffing your mailbox with trash and pornographic materials and other insults to your intelligence and your morals. People are advised to get a new email address to avoid the problem. That is analogous to having to pick up your furniture and family and move to a new house. And then within days if not hours, be found and have your mailbox stuffed once again.”
The author gets it right, until they hit the paragraph at the end stating (along with Jon Udell) that digital IDs and signed emails are the solution. That’s the problem — one can’t wander around telling all your correspondents to rebuild their email systems, and use new methods simply to talk to one. And even then, a whole new — and scary — layer of infrastructure needs to be built to issue, guarantee, and revoke the IDs, and let’s hope to ghod it’s not Verisign ;) It’s just not viable.
Damn, the Simputer development effort is running into money problems.
THE SIMPUTER — whose name is an acronym for Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual Computer — was launched in April 2001. … Running on AAA batteries, they included a built-in speaker, microphone, telephone jack and modem as well as USB and smart card connectors. Internet browsers and e-mail applications would be standard. Among software that has been developed for the Simputer are applications covering electronic governance, literacy initiatives and dissemination of health information.
‘Nobody has built a computer for the rural and poor people. Also, there is no license for the hardware or software. That is probably the reason for their hesitation.’
Sweetcode.org: haven’t looked at it in 6 months, but it’s got great stuff, like:
CRM-114 “is a system to examine incoming e-mail, system log streams, data files or other data streams, and to sort, filter, or alter the incoming files or data streams according to whatever the user desires. Criteria for categorization of data can be by satisfaction of regexes, by sparse spectra, or by other means. Accuracy of the sparse spectra function has been seen in excess of 99 per cent, for 10+ megabytes of learning text”.
Panorama Tools : “Software to View, Create, Edit and Remap Panoramic Images”. If I can ever afford to get all my photos printed, I’ll need this.
According to BrightMail, spam volume to their traps has quintupled in the last year; from 879,253 messages per month to 4,825,144. Insane. PDF graph here.
Bake, Don’t Fry: Aaron Swartz has written a good article about static page generation vs. database-backed websites, with a hefty plug for WebMake.
But he seems to miss the fact that WebMake does all the dep-tracking tricks described in Building Baked Sites — modulo the odd bug in the dep-tracking code. ;).
“(On July 4) Israeli officials reported that a missile may have exploded a few miles from an EL-AL plane flying over the Ukraine. Over the weekend, however, both the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and Ukraine’s National Space Agency indicated that a meteor rather than a terrorist attack may have been the cause of the atmospheric fireball explosion.”
Random musing: I saw a memorable meteor strike while I was visiting Fraser Island in Australia — while walking along in bright sunshine, without a cloud in the sky, a burning fireball streaked across the sky from west to east. It burnt up before it hit the sea, however. Wish I’d got a picture.
–Benny Peiser, 8 July 2002
Hooray! Dug my headphones out from the box where they’ve been stowed for the last 6 months, found my mp3 backups, and I can finally listen to music again! Current top picks (in a retro style):
Tribe of Issachar – original dubplate
Barrington Levy – Under Mi Sensi
Congo Natty – Champion DJ
Hyper-On Experience – Lords of the Null Lines
Sizzla – Praise Ye Jah
Man, I missed good reggae on my holidays — there’s only so much Bob Marley you can take ;)
Biological Warfare and the “Buffy Paradigm”.
Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation (biological warfare) — and planning for it — is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or chaos theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the Buffy Paradigm, and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the Buffy Syndrome.
My ghod. It’s not quite as bad as Jerry Pournelle and SDI in the 80’s, but it’s getting there…
“Archaeologists can now say with confidence what life was like for the Roman legionaries stationed at the end of empire: in Carlisle, almost 2,000 years ago – it rained all the time and it stank of fermented fish.”
Synchronicity! The fermented fish paste cropped up at the weekend, too. Described in the article as “a luxurious import from Spain and undoubtedly one of the most prized possessions of a wealthy Roman officer” and (in Latin on the amphora) “Tunny fish relish from Tangiers, old”, this was made near my parents’ house in Torrox in Andalucia, Spain — or at least, if it was common across Spain, the Torrox version was much prized by the Romans.
Sadly, it’s no longer made. But I’m a bit of a fish paste fan — you can’t make decent Thai or Laotian food without nam pla, and for a taste sensation on toast, Patum Peperium (“The Gentleman’s Relish”) is unbeatable in a steampunk-breakfast kind of way. In fact, the Roman paste sounds very similar. (Link)
Phew! That took a while, and it was only the watch-camera pics. The 1000 “proper” photos may take a while longer to get up. But without further ado, here’s some shots from my travels:
BTW regarding the Nepal image above: we must have just missed these guys, but their MS-sponsored patches (surely “service packs”? snicker) were much in evidence along the trail.
Mac Websites have this quality of I’ve been exploring and stumbled upon this cool (yet mysterious) trick! How endlessly curious is my strange friend!. Linux sites have much less of this idea of PC as mysterious black box. Tips tend to come with long explanations attached as to why they work, and why all other ways of doing it are Considered Dangerous.
(both via BoingBoing.) BTW I’ve removed swhack — which seems to have 404’ed — and replaced it with Oblomovka and Aaron’s blog.
One for Ireland Offline — the Pew Research Center’s report The Broadband Difference: How online Americans’ behavior changes with high-speed Internet connections at home.
For broadband users, the always-on, high-speed connection expands the scope of their online activities and the frequency with which they do them. It transforms their online experience. This has led to steady growth in broadband adoption among Net users. Since the Pew Internet Project first inquired about the nature of users home connection in June 2000, the number of high-speed home users has quadrupled from 6 million to 24 million Americans. This places home broadband adoption rates on par with the adoption of other popular technologies, such as the personal computer and the compact disc player, and faster than color TV and the VCR.
The Open Web Application Security Project’s Guide to Building Secure Web Applications:
The Guide covers various web application security topics from architecture to preventing attack specifics like cross site scripting, cookie poisoning and SQL injection.
Hotmail users face summer of random email deletion: “Microsoft Hotmail users have been warned that their emails could be randomly deleted this summer, unless they pay UKP 19.99 for extra storage space.”
Good NYT article on spam. Worth blogging, despite it’s age, for this stat:
A (Federal Trade Commission) survey showed that 63 percent of “remove me” options (on spam mail) either did not work or resulted in even more e-mail.
I’ve tested this, too, but it’s nice to have such an authoritative source to quote.
However, they missed SpamAssassin — totally off their radar, it seems. I wonder why?
Interesting notes on level design in 3D games. FPS means first-person shooter, TPS third-person shooter. Both refer to the position of the “camera” while you’re playing.
In an FPS, realistic room sizes would be pretty much what they are in real life, in a TPS they’re closer to double that of real life. If your average bedroom is 4×5 meters and 2.5 meters high, in a TPS the size would be 8×10 meters and the height 4 meters; the great thing about larger sizes is that the characters are easier to control and the spaces don’t even feel too big!
But what about furniture? If the room is 150-200 percent of realistic size, surely the pieces of furniture need to be large as well? Not exactly. The best approach really is to make the furniture close to real life scale as the characters in the game are as well of real size — making the furniture larger would result in the characters looking like children and that’s definitely something you should avoid. Please note I’m not saying you shouldn’t scale the furniture, but rather than the effect should be kept to a bare minimum; making the pieces 10-20 percent larger than what’s realistic still results in close enough real size tables, chairs, couches etc., but it also ensures the rooms don’t look overly large. Its also important to remember the spacing between the pieces — even if they are about real life size, the space between doesn’t need to be, go with whatever still looks good and makes the movement of the characters easier.
A good rule of thumb for all this is to make things the player gets near closer to the their real life size. Objects further away can be too large, as it often makes the space look of more realistically sized. Another pointer to keep in mind is a thing they teach people studying architecture: one centimeter on the floor is ten on the wall is a meter in the ceiling – as your gaze is usually downward, you tend notice small things on the ground more easily than larger ones in the ceiling.
Yeesh! taint.org is rapidly turning into BlogAssassin, it looks like. Here’s a good SpamAssassin story from Declan McCullagh: Deconstructing Richard Gephardt’s releases, by SpamAssassin. 3 WHOLE LINES OF YELLING DETECTED!
Whoops — another SpamAssassin plug, this time from Peter G. Neumann, moderator of the RISKS Forum. Looks like I’m collecting the entire Internet Secret Cabal at this rate!
I’m back! And I wrote a long, well-thought-out update, and poxy,
broken SuSE 8.0 ate it, without even leaving a dead.letter turd.
Bastard.
But in the meantime, I must note that it’s mind-bogglingly cool to have people
like Salon,
Bruce
Sterling, Simson
Garfinkel and Cory at BoingBoing
plugging SpamAssassin, and to come back to Ireland to find
that dogma, our humble server, got slashdotted as a result!
In passing — it looks like Danny O’Brien now has a blog called Oblomovka. Worth taking a look at. I’m still struggling through several thousand mails, so for now even adding it to my bookmarks is on the to-do list.
OK, we’re back in Pokhara, after a 10-day trek up to the Annapurna Base Camp. Much fun, and much dhal bhat, was had by both of us, despite some initial scariness…
Basically, myself, Catherine and Bhadra our guide, spent a very pleasant first night in Dhampus, the first stop on the 10-day trek. Much rakshi (local millet booze, tastes like watered-down lukewarm vodka) was imbibed, resulting in some seriously ludicrous attempts at Nepali dancing! Thankfully there’s no photos.
Next day, we hiked up to the next town, Pothana, over some very leechy trails (top leech tip: cover your boots in salt, they can’t stand it). All well and good, until halfway through the town a Dutch guy ran out of a teahouse and stopped us, telling us that an English couple had been attacked in the forest just outside the town — of course, we immediately went to meet them. The guy had a bloodsoaked bandage tied around his head, and told us how himself and his girlfriend had been walking through the forest towards the next town, Landruk, when a Nepali guy approached. The English guy said namaste (hello), and was rewarded with a wallop over the head with a 6-foot stick! They then stole his girlfriend’s rucksack and attempted to take his, but (somehow) he managed to fight them off with half of the stick, then escaped.
With some help (and interpreting) from Bhadra, we found out from the locals that there was a gang of robbers operating in this forest, and a week previous to this, 2 Swedish girls had to be airlifted out because they were too badly beaten to walk! Serious problem — and one nobody had bothered to inform any of us tourists about!
After this, the 8 tourists, and their respective guides and porters, all trooped out of the village — Bhadra knew a quick route back to the road over a ridge, which saved us a half-day’s walk back via Dhampus. Along the way, the English couple were stopped by what seemed to be the entire village, who were having a very heated conversation. The upshot was that they wanted the English couple to wait around for a half day until some of the men returned from the forest, hopefully with captive robbers in tow, and then the whole lot would get the bus back to Pokhara (the nearest city) and give out stink to ACAP, the Annapurna Conservation Area Project, who run the area. The English couple agreed, and we went on.
Eventually, we sidetracked around to another way up the trek. Myself and Catherine were the only 2 tourists to head up — everyone else decided to head back to Pokhara, but we were happy enough with Bhadra’s assurances that this route was very well-travelled, with no forests and no known robberies (by day at least).
It turned out for the best in the end — we had an amazing trek, got loads of pictures, saw the entire Annapurna range from the Annapurna Sanctuary, no clouds, and no further robberies. And lots of rakshi!
In the end, we heard through the grapevine that the robbers had been attacked by the local Maoists (the police don’t patrol the mountains any more). One 17-year old robber was shot, and 2 more had their arms and legs broken. Rough justice in the traditional paramilitary law enforcement style, I guess. (By the way, the Maoists enjoy about 80% support in the mountains, from what we’ve heard).
The remaining robbers hightailed it to Pokhara as well (they were not locals), and were eventually arrested. Hopefully the Nepalese law enforcement system can sort it out – corruption is apparently rife, but around here they take these kind of tourist-targeting attacks very seriously — for many people, it’s their livelihood, and it’s already suffered a lot this year due to the political situation.
So, a happy ending for us, and a warning for anyone else out there thinking of doing the Annapurna Sanctuary trek — stick to the known-safe trails, and bring a Nepali guide/porter for extra safety.
Photos will be forthcoming once we get back to Ireland, earn some money, get them developed and scan them in. This could take several months though… ;)
Latest update: (This one’s a bit lazy. I’m just editing Catherine’s mail to travelogue, adding a few bits.)
We flew from New Zealand to Bangkok on the 18th of April. From Bangkok we headed for Laos via Nong Khai in North-eastern Thailand, on a comfy first-class train carriage again (spoiling ourselves!).
We then made for the Northern Thai border, passing through Vientiane, Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang.
Vang Vieng is a tiny little town which has evolved into a tourist chill-out zone for falang (foreign) and south-east Asian tourists alike — we spent a nice afternoon with a group of holidaying Thai Buddhist monks, jumping into a deep river pool on a rope swing! (Camera was out of film for that one, sorry folks). Great fun spot though.
Having said that, Luang Prabang was definitely the highlight, I would highly recommend anybody to go there. The city is crammed with Buddhist temples from the 14th to the 21st century counterbalanced with crumbling old french colonial architecture. All of this is set by the Mekong river, filled with river traffic of all descriptions from water buffalo to large chinese sampans.
After this we headed for Thailand, up the Mekong river, on a speedboat. These are a reasonably insane way to travel, hitting speeds of 80km/h, and shooting the occasional rapids! We’d heard it was possible to have to wait a day or two before getting on a boat, so we paid extra to pre-book, just to make sure it was OK.
Things started badly, with an hour and a half delay as our pre-booked tickets didn’t really seem to make a difference; eventually we persuaded our boat to get underway, with 7 passengers instead of the promised max 6.
Then we hit Pakbeng, the halfway point, had a spot of lunch, and waited another bonus 1/2 hour, before our driver informed us that we’d be changing boats after the 2 Lao passengers left, leaving 4 falang in the boat. (The passenger details may seem meaningless, but I think he’d never have embarked on the next bit if a local was around to give him a bollocking).
It turned out our new driver had a nice sideline in trading pla beuk (giant Mekong catfish) and live monitor lizards up and down the river! After about 6 stops for chats, buying and selling, our group of 4 was joined by his 2 mates, 2 sacks of live lizards, 2 2-meter-long live pla beuk and another large, live mystery fish, all thrashing about occasionally. I’d wanted to see a pla beuk, but not this much!
Eventually we lost the rag a bit, and I think this got us to Huay Xai before the border post shut for the day. Not a good experience. For reference, our tickets were booked through a ticket agent 2 doors up from the LPB Lao Aviation office (one of our co-passengers booked through the Lao Aviation office itself), and our agent had assured us that these things — or the ones we could foresee at least! — were not going to happen. Suggestion: don’t bother pre-booking, or if you do, make sure you get these assurances in writing!
Anyway, after that we made it into Thailand, pretty sure we were going to be stuck in Chiang Khong (we’d missed the last bus to Chiang Rai or Chiang Mai, our intended destination). But the good news was that an agent of Namkhong Travel was touting on the far side of the Thai border post, and got 3 of us onto a very comfortable, very reasonably-priced private air-con minibus bound for Chiang Mai — so see, touts are good! Namkhong Travel certainly get my thumbs-up anyway.
So we are currently in Chang Mai which we missed on our last visit, and ahead of schedule no less. We are not sure exactly what to do next, we have a few days to mess about with, as we are leaving SE Asia on the 11th of May to fly to Nepal.
Writing from an internet cafe in Luang Prabang, Laos. It’s sweltering, of course, so we’ve spent a day hiding in the shadows of wats (temples) and drinking pineapple and lemon shakes.
Despite warnings of bbq’ed rat and grilled frogs, we’ve found the food to be excellent — laap and sticky rice being the top favourite at the moment. Back to Thailand in a few days for more top tucker!
Well, we’re back in Auckland after zooming around the South Island. Got to meet up with June and Vin in Christchurch for a tasty meal and much yakking about NZ; take a look at that site for pictures and imagine me and Kate instead of June and Vin, and you’ll have a good idea of what we’ve been up to… I haven’t even developed the photos we’ve taken yet!
We did meet up with a mate from Dublin — Yvonne; we didn’t even know she was over here, but there you go. Basically, we wandered into a Dept of Conservation (they manage the National Parks) office in Queenstown, intending to get some ideas of good walks to do, and who was working behind the counter but the girl herself. Small world! So we all did a 20km hike. WTF is New Zealand doing to us?!
Anyway, next update will probably be from Thailand — we still haven’t firmed up an itinerary yet. Let’s hope the political situation in Nepal settles down before we get there…
We’re currently zooming through New Zealand in the cheapest way possible,
while still managing to see some stuff - very hectic and lots of early
Help! We’re staying in a tent in a malarial swamp for 56 bucks a night! Can you spell rip-off?
But I think that’s Byron Bay for you. We’ll probably stay here tonight for the night that’s in it — there’s lots of bars here (happy Paddy’s Day), then rock up to Lennox Head, which sounds like a thoroughly nicer (and cheaper) beach chill-out kind of place. With any luck Lennox Head has less fairy-tat-selling hippie shops, flaming jugglers, etc. as well.
Fraser Island was cool, dingoes spotted, still no snakes or sharks though! BTW I’m not impressed by the “that’ll kill ya, mate” stories — IMO, picnics in th’ oul’ sod are more beset by stinging insects, plants, and rampaging animals than this place is (Queensland stingers and crocs excepted). Sure, there are dangerous animals out there, but they’re extremely rare, whereas the minor irritations of aggressive wasps and nettles are far too common at home. Plus the weather’s nicer here ;)
In other news I’ve just plumped for a copy of Lord of the Rings, so my reading will be sorted for the next few months I think!
La Feile Padraig shona diobh, will update again soonish…
Touching land once again! Much swaying is taking place as the sea legs wear off.
The Whitsundays are lovely — a great archipelago of 74 islands off the Queensland coast, with beautiful blue seas and white coral and sand beaches. Good fish-watching too: pairs of cuttlefish, some large coral and potato cod, and — best of all — a huge (1.5m) Maori wrasse called “Elvis”. Catherine got some diving in, but I was surface-bound by a nasty cold so had to stick with snorkeling. Still, I think I saw more fish, ha.
Now off to Hervey Bay and Fraser Island (via the night bus. argh). Another update at that point!
Well, just back from diving on the Great Barrier Reef; lots of good fish, and no attacks from groupers called “Grumpy”, thankfully.
Disappointingly, there were no sharks either. But I spotted lots of other good wildlife; a good few green turtles munching coral, lionfish, and some pretty large coral cod.
Great diving! Hopefully the pictures will come out OK once they’re developed — if so, I’ll scan ’em. First though, there’s sailing in the Whitsundays…